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Tim Bridgewater Admits His Gut Level Instincts Are Wrong for Utah

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  April 6th, 2010 at 06:52 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Tim Bridgewater this morning is admitting he supported No Child Left Behind, a piece of legislation that even Bob Bennett would not support.

Bridgewater, in a press release, noted:

While Tim Bridgewater did support the concept of NCLB which passed in 2001, Tim’s support for the legislation fell flat when the concept of holding teachers accountable for teaching standard curriculum turned into unfunded federal mandates and one size fits all testing. When Tim Bridgewater saw the effects of NCLB he led Utah in the fight against it as the Governor’s Deputy of Education.

“No Child Left Behind created unintended consequences at the state level. As soon as I saw these consequences I began fighting against the program, going against my own party on an issue I knew needed to be changed. Senator Bennett is well aware of my fight against No Child Left Behind and I am disappointed in his half truth on this issue,” said Tim Bridgewater.

Friends, those consequences were not unintended — they were known well before No Child Left Behind passed. Bridgewater is having to now run from his record. And even if they were unknown, a conservative gut level instinct would have intrinsically known the overreaching hand of the federal government would screw things up.

The people of Utah have a choice to make. Do they want to keep Bob Bennett, a man who with only rare exception, has never shown a conservative instinct? Or do they want to replace Bob Bennett with a candidate who is, at his very core, unabashedly conservative? If the latter, the choice must be Mike Lee, not a man who claims the very known consequences of No Child Left Behind were either unknown or unintended.

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  • Right_Again

    The anti-Bennett crowd’s support appears to be coalescing behind Mike Lee. A recent (unscientific) poll of 1,500 students, state delegates and the public who attended a meet-the-candidates meeting at Utah Valley University found that 50% support Mike Lee.

    Mike needs Tim Bridgewater’s supporters to support him if (when) Bridgewater is eliminated in the early voting at the convention. There is no need to alienate those supporters by attacking Bridgewater now.

    Having spoken to Tim at the recent Tea Party event in Provo, I can tell you he seems to be a good man. He is running to replace Bennett as are most of the candidates. He would love to win, but to me that currently appears unlikely. My hope is that if he is eliminated at the convention he will encourage his supporters to back Mike Lee. That will be easier for him to do if Mike and Mike’s backers have not attacked him.

    You make a valid point in your diary. I just think your attacks on Bennett are much more productive than attacks on the other (less likely to win) candidates.

    I Like Mike Lee for Senate 2010.

  • Next93

    Most of the complaints I’ve heard about NCLB have had to do with the fact that (a) schools that have been teaching below what should have been the minimum standards are now having to “teach to the tests”, (b) teachers are going to be expected to actually be accountable for the massive spending they represent, and (c) once we have a baseline, it will expose the myth that increasing per-student spending results in “better” education.

    Given the massive amounts of money we spend on K-12 public schools, it’s NOT unreasonable that there’s a minimum set of standards and that we hold schools and teachers accountable for results. If the teachers don’t like that, they should try getting a job in the private sector and see what accountability really feels like.

  • arc_ut

    I believe that Cherilyn Eagar is the only one running who has supported and been active in fighting for conservative values for the last 30 years at the local, state, national and international level. [That includes Bennett]

    Bridgewater is running further to the right than he did the previous 2 times he has run, but he can learn. He isn’t making the same mistakes as when he lost the other two times.

  • zroxx

    This is a good place to start educating yourself on NCLB and its failures. In fact the entire education category at Cato has plenty of good information regarding NCLB.

    Here’s an excerpt that relates a common occurrence when states (in this example, South Carolina) desperately want the “federal funding” that a centrally controlled program like NCLB doles out:

    H.R. 4662 — the legislative hero coming to rescue you from relatively meaningful standards — would amend the Educational Accountability Act of 1998 and end the hated Palmetto Achievement Challenge Tests. It would replace PACT with assessments that would supposedly give more timely, diagnostic results, but it would also redesignate outcomes now called “proficient” — the state-defined achievement level NCLB requires all students to hit by 2014 — as “exemplary,” and render so-called proficiency a deceptively lame goal.
    [...]
    Last week Rep. Bob Walker (R-Landrum), chairman of the House Education and Public Works Committee, promised that the state isn’t lowering standards. It’s just that “you will see a dramatic increase in your level of proficiency” without any actual boost in student knowledge. [cite]

    NCLB and similarly constructed federal programs that use piles of taxpayer cash as an incentive to conform with the current administration’s “standards” do not incentivize improvement. They reward the production of spreadsheets and powerpoints that give a false impression of achievement by engineering the “results” to match whatever it takes to get the taxpayer funds back to the state.

    Even setting aside the full frontal utopianism inherent in the legi-slogan, “No Child Left Behind”, and the suspect constitutionality of federal control of education – similar grounds for which the health care “reform” movement are being well and rightly criticized on this site – NCLB was a step in the wrong direction, away from market-based education.

    The only entity that should be deciding whether the education a child receives is adequate is the parent, who should be allowed to freely contract with an education provider for said services. Rather than strengthening federal/central control over education we should be working for its elimination.

    Another way to look at it: substitute “health care” for “education” and “health care provider” for “education provider” in the preceding paragraph and see if that doesn’t comport with the core belief you have regarding a citizen’s liberty and opportunity to manage their own (and their family’s) health related purchases in an open market. To put it yet another way, if you don’t want central/federal control by government of health care workers and citizens’ health care decisions, why in the world would you support central/federal control of education workers and citizens’ education decisions? NCLB did more to entrench control of education in the federal bureaucracy’s hands than anything else save the very creation of the federal Dept of Education. And now that tool of control is subject to use by liberals and socialists.

  • justcase

    If we now get to change our histories, does Mr. Bridgewater now get to go back and say that he shouldn’t have supported vigorously John McCain, or was that call okay?

    If you want to know who a candidate is, just look to their record and their actions in the past. Let’s not TRAIN a new Senator who hasn’t even had political background.

    As for a “straw poll”, how many of these bogus polls are we going to suffer through? The UVU “straw poll” was done in Mike Lee’s home turf, and even if you pretend (a big stretch here) that Lee’s camp didn’t know there’d be a poll, he always has his followers come to all his rallys to support him. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it does give him a distinct advantage.

    Eagar and Bridgewater had no idea of the poll, and even though this was in Bridgewater’s backyard as well, Eagar beat him in the “poll”.

    Hmmmm . . . I wonder what will happen when we have a REAL vote? The only official vote taken this year to determine an endorsement was the Utah Republican Assembly, held for the express purpose of determining an endorsed candidate. It was held in Lee and Bridgewater’s backyards, but Eagar came out with the SUPER MAJORITY of 64%!

  • aesthete
  • aesthete

    federal mandates and one-size-fits-all testing wasn’t a “consequence”, it was the whole point.

  • pamdale

    Mike Lee for U.S. Senate 2010

  • davesinsanantonio

    with it’s limited powers at the federal level, if we actually practiced these concepts, is that the federal government could not establish this sort of nonsense that hurts the whole country and is extremely hard to get rid of. If one state tried something stupid like this, the other states could learn from that mistake and not repeat it. However, when we let the feds get away with it, we are all stuck with it. The Law of Unintended Consequences is just as true and immutable as Murphy’s Law, economic laws, or the Law of the Harvest. The problem for decades has been that the lib-nuts think they are immune from all such laws. They are not, but their arrogance will not let them learn that lesson.

  • davesinsanantonio

    The guy at the district decided that we needed to have “benchmark” tests to make sure the kids were progressing. We had them every six weeks, taking away six teaching days out of the academic year to accomplish them. Then he decided we should take another day each six weeks to go over the benchmark test. Now we have lost 12 of our 180 teaching days to see if the kids were learning anything. Of course, the state has end-of-course tests and other test to accomplish this. This guy’s tests were a compilation of multiple-choice questions that he got from the textbook publisher. Their quality was low, and the questions tended to ask for minor details rather than real understanding. In addition, I taught in a different sequence than he thought was necessary. I did so because of my experience that the kids learned it better my way. This guy had never taught at the high school level, nor had he taught my subject, but he refused to listen. So, my kids, who did well on the state test, did poorly on his benchmarks. He had the audacity to compare my kids scores to that of another teacher whose kids always got hundreds on the benchmarks. He thought that man was a brilliant teacher, but all that man did was put the answers on the chalkboard while the kids were taking the test so that the district weenie would think he was actually teaching and leave him alone!

  • davesinsanantonio

    innumerable times, but you have never said anything else positive about her. If that is her only achievement, she should keep doing it, but not from public office. It is wonderful that she does support conservative values, but not enough. Give it up, and support a candidate with a track record of doing something. We have suffered enough from a president without an actual history of accomplishment, we don’t need any more office holders “whose turn it is”!

  • mrjiblet

    Y’know those big halide lights used in warehouses? They generate a consistent buzz. At first it’s a little bothersome, eventually it becomes such an omnipresent sound your mind simply cuts it out.

    arc_ut, bzzzzzz. Cherilyn Eagar. bzzzzzz. bzzzzz. bzzzz. bzz. bz. b.

  • dwscho

    Perhaps Bridgewater found himself in the same hole as many members of Congress who vote for bills without having read and understood the consequences. If not, shame on him. We shouldn’t forgive him for not doing his job. If he did read it and didn’t understand the consequences, shame on him for not understanding what he was voting for. Let’s not elect another dummy.

  • Next93

    The education industry has made an art form of inflicting as much pain as possible in the execution of directives they dislike. If they don’t get the budget increases they ask for, they cut are the most visible aspects of the system, They execute “zero tolerance” policies in the most stupid way possible because they don’t like the fact that they were stripped of the discretionary powers that they abused for a generation. And they implement simple tests for minimal skills in the most disruptive possible way, in order to prove that education is impossible if teachers are held accountable for the quality of thier work product.